


Strained Progression

by TartCherryJuice



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, Rating May Change, and likely will, eventual clexa, subject to add more as I write more, tagging characters I know will be present
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-17 20:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3542468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TartCherryJuice/pseuds/TartCherryJuice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set immediately after 2x16. Clarke leaves Camp Jaha and has to come to terms with what she did at Mt. Weather. Things don't go as planned. (This story might be a monster, so this should be fun, yeah?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Prologue. A taste for what's to come.

“You don’t have to do this alone.”

Bellamy’s words ring in her ear and Clarke looks toward the entrance of Camp Jaha. Her mother has been laid down on the ground, Jackson scanning her injuries while Kane oversees it like a hawk. They should move her to a proper bed. They don’t need to be treating her out in the open like this. They should-

Clarke looks away, refusing to let her resolve waver.

“I bear it,” she moves to meet Bellamy’s eyes again, “so they don’t have to.”

Bellamy looks at her with a breaking expression, begging her to stay (he looks too old), but he knows her. He _knows_ Clarke. They’ve been to hell and back again, an understanding passing through them that only partners in a crucible could conceive. He know she’s made up her mind, and there is nothing he can do or say to change it.

“Where’re you going to go?”

Clarke wishes she had an answer for him.

“I don’t know.”

And then she’s leaning in, pressing her lips on his cheek. It’s a promise. She will come back. Clarke doesn’t know when, or under what circumstance, but they will see each other again.

She shifts so that she’s hugging him, holding tight around him, but only for a moment. Her touch is soon feather light, trying to hold back tears as she whispers.

“May we meet again.”

Clarke releases him from the embrace, giving him one last look over and suddenly has a flash image in her head of their first few days on the ground together. The way he walked with a swagger, hair slicked back, trying to be a leader that he didn’t deserve to be. Now he’s standing tall without even trying. He has been her rock, always there whenever she turned around, ready with an open palm.

She’s leaving them in good hands. Tried. Capable.

It seems only fitting that she re-learns how to hold herself up now.

So she turns. She turns away from him and her people, gun swinging loosely in her hand, and walks. She’s not abandoning them, Bellamy will make sure they understand that, but she needs to get away and they need to rebuild.

Her boots crunch under the newly worn path as she hits the tree line. She takes a deep breath, smelling the pine and feeling the slight sting of crisp air in her nose. Fall will be hitting them soon, if it hasn’t already, and Clarke wonders if they will get snow in this part of the world.

Her feet hesitate to move forward, unsure of where they want to go. Clarke takes a moment to compose herself, resisting the urge to look back at Camp Jaha, as she tries to come up with a destination.

Not the bunker, absolutely not, and not the dropship either, that would be the first place her mother would look. And she _will_ look, Clarke is sure of it.

Clarke looks down at the path again, and suddenly feels a pang of a memory in her chest. It’s a painful one, one that she almost forgot in the rush of the past few weeks. It makes her feel guilty, as if she needed any more reasons to feel that way, but this one may be alleviated. No one would think to look for her in the place she has in mind.

This guilt gives her a destination.


	2. Ninety-nine to One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The computer screen is currently a blur, but I wanted to put something up for you guys. Hope there aren't too many mistakes! (I'll type in the date of whenever I edit for each chapter at the beginning notes from now on.)

It takes Clarke a few hours to reach her destination.

She had holstered her weapon soon after leaving the gate of Camp Jaha, but kept her eyes peeled for movement around her. It was not the most sensible idea to head out on her own, but she needed to be alone. At least for now.

Her mind had kept running in the same cycle during her trek. Dante’s astonished expression when he felt her bullet rip through his chest, Cage’s decided eyes, Monty’s pleading innocence, Jasper’s disgusted grimace, Raven’s anguished cries, all of the faces she saw in the mountain melded together into something monstrous. It thrived on her fresh memories, coaxing her into a numb state.

It was only when she spotted the familiar clearing that Clarke stopped and tasted the salt in her mouth. She reaches up to wipe the offending tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, however she is foiled in her attempt when she remembers the armored gloves she dons. She moves to pull that garment off but stops, suddenly feeling unwilling. They were a gift after all. A gift from a face Clarke doesn’t see haunting her memories of the mountain, but one that should be.

Clarke had been very confused when she saw the gloves sitting on the desk next to the war table one morning during the preparation period for the attack on Mount Weather. Clarke always made sure to arrive before the other leaders, thoroughly looking over the details of her proposals to make sure they were sufficient. So, when Clarke saw the clothing sitting on top of the notes she had left there last night, she lifted them up in curiosity.

Underneath she found a scrawled note, the paper ripped off from one of her rejected plans of attack. There was a definitive headline reading, _CLARKE_ , with a small bit of Trigedasleng underneath.

_‘Gud thru mecha wit yu justrat.’_

Although she kept the note with her plans, she never did learn what the translation was.

Clarke smiles in a way that feels more like a scowl, because she would be the one to pull Clarke out of her destructive thoughts, if only for a moment. Even in her absence, she still manages to scold Clarke for her weakness.

_You came here to heal_ , she would say, _so do it._

Lexa always was direct.

Clarke leaves the gauntlets on as she wipes away the tears with her fingertips and walks toward the lone gravestone. Although, “gravestone” might be giving it too much credit, rather it is a large rock to mark where Clarke had buried the body.

It was a nice little alcove. Clarke had placed the rock directly at the foot of one of the largest trees she could find in the vicinity, the few feet around the trunk lush and green under the sun. Or, at least, it was. Now the grass has a waterlogged texture to it, stained a mud brown from the rainy soil.

Clarke steps up to the definitive mound that she had dug not so long ago and kneels down. Her pants dig into the soggy ground and she can feel the water seep through the cloth as she places her hand on the earth.

“Hey, Anya.”

She pinches a bit of the ground and sifts it through her palm into her other hand, “I really hope you don’t mind I buried you here.”

That had been one of her fears when she had dragged Anya’s lifeless body as far from Camp Jaha as she could. The last thing she had wanted to do was disrespect the woman, the first grounder to ever trust her, and she hadn’t known what else to do. Clarke hopes that it’s enough, the intention to do good.

Clarke sighs at her own thoughts.

_Intention._

It has to be enough.

“I’m going to stay with you for a bit, if you don’t mind.” Clarke murmurs to the ground and moves to sit with her back propped up against the tree.

She leans her head back and closes her eyes after a time, listening. Listening to nothing. There is no whirr of machinery or even the sound of wildlife, just the wind rustling leaves loose of their host flora. Whenever she feels her mind start to wander, start to darken, she tries to focus on the nothing.

She hasn’t slept since before the assault on Mount Weather, when she was able to close her eyes without seeing an entire dining room full of innocent people simultaneously laughing and motionless in death. She feels so tired – body, mind, and soul – and Clarke wonders if there’s a kind of sleep to restore all of them at once.

She can think of only one, but it isn’t an option. She must endure to keep the crushing weight of a mountain on her shoulders, and hers alone.

When sleep eventually does come, it is dreamless, but ultimately unsatisfying when she awakens with a jolt some time later with the sun still in the sky. Clarke is blinking tired eyes and stretching the tense muscles in her neck when her senses tip her off to something amiss. She scans the area around her as she quietly gets on her feet. When she hears a rustle to her left, not too far away, her hand quickly moves to remove her gun from its holster and aims it in the general direction.

Keeping her finger off the trigger, Clarke moves around the enormous trunk of the tree to get a better look. When there is another rustle, Clarke can see the movement this time as well but can’t make out what it is. She licks her lips and can feel her heartrate escalate with each passing moment as she stares at the unknown. She nearly jumps out of her skin when a voice calls out to her.

“Hey, I’m making noise so that you know I’m coming, not so you can shoot me.”

It came from the direction that Clarke is pointing her gun and she immediately lowers and puts her weapon away. She’d know that voice anywhere.

“What are you doing here, Octavia?” Clarke says in an exasperated tone as the other girl weaves her way through some rogue bushes and braches to reveal herself.

Octavia makes her way towards Clarke with a small frown on her face. It’s a frown that has become a familiar sight to Clarke, as much as she wishes otherwise. The charcoal war paint, a constant feature since she agreed to be Indra’s second, has also been washed off her face to reveal the young girl underneath the warrior. She hasn’t changed her clothes however, and Clarke can see a pack on her back, but what’s more predominant is the dead rabbit hanging off of one of the straps. It bounces against her side with each step she takes. She mumbles something unintelligible as she steps past Clarke and into the small clearing.  
   
"Did Bellamy send you?" Clarke questions the girl who is now slipping off her backpack and opening it. When Octavia doesn't answer, Clarke struts up next to her and crouches down to the same level. Clarke is about to question her again, but Octavia beats her to the punch.  
   
"My brother doesn't even know I'm gone," she states bluntly and looks up at the falling sun in the sky. "He might have figured it out by now though."  
   
Clarke watches as Octavia unpacks and promptly realizes that the Blake sibling actually has two backpacks. She is currently trying to take out a sleeping bag that had obviously been stuffed carelessly into one of them. Clarke narrows her eyes at her actions.  
   
"Then that doesn't answer my question," Clarke says with suspicion. "What’re you doing here?"  
   
Octavia continues to work silently after her question and Clarke snaps. She grabs the girl’s forearm as she is pulling out the last of the sleeping material and Octavia freezes. Clarke isn't sure she made the best move by touching her, but at least she doesn't have a sword to her throat.

"Get your hand _off of me._ "  
   
Yet.  
   
Clarke does as she's told and Octavia rewards her by meeting her gaze for the first time since her arrival. She wipes the dirt off of her pants as she stands up straight and Clarke follows, waiting for an explanation.  
   
"I'm here," she crosses her arms in defiance, "to make sure you don't get yourself killed."  
   
"I can take care of myself," Clarke is quick and curt with her words. "Besides, I thought you were, 'done with me'."  
   
Clarke glares at Octavia and watches as her eyes harden before they roll in annoyance.  
   
"You know, sometimes you can be a real fucking idiot, Clarke." Octavia tries to crouch down and start unpacking again, but Clarke grabs her arm to keep her on her feet.  
   
This time she gets a more aggressive reaction. Octavia rips her arm out her grasp and moves to unsheathe the sword strapped to her back. Instinct must have been the reason for it though, because Octavia stops her movement before the sword is fully in her grasp. It is an instinct that Clarke didn't realize the other girl had gained.  
   
Clarke feels a misplaced melancholy in her stomach, causing the fight to quickly leave her body because this girl who almost drew a sword on her, who’s smile she hasn’t seen since they brought Lincoln back from the dead, is Octavia. She feels blind for not noticing how much the younger girl has changed since that first step she took off the dropship those short months ago.  
   
"Octavia..." Clarke whispers, feeling too physically and emotionally drained to find any of her previous anger.  
   
Octavia's eyes soften somewhat and she bites the side of her cheek before finding the ground infinitely more interesting than Clarke's face. Clarke knows she does this because being cold and stoic is not who she is, at her core. No matter what kind of warrior training she has or how many hard hits she takes, Octavia will never be able to get rid of her spirit to _feel_. She lets her emotions run free inside, if not always expressing them, and experiences everything to the fullest extent that she can. She would throw herself into a fire if only to say that she knows what it is to be burned.  
   
"I hate what you did," Octavia starts suddenly, soft but building momentum and volume with each word. "I hate that you let an entire village burn to the ground for the sake of keeping up appearances. I hate that you listened to Lexa. I hate that _I know_ about it and still haven’t said anything, but most of all... I hate that I don't hate you."  
   
She lifts her head to look at Clarke again. "I said that I would be done with you after Mount Weather, but the truth is, none of us can. None of us can ever be _done_ with you, Clarke."  
   
Octavia's jaw muscles clench and ripple underneath her skin. “We owe you too much.”

There is a moment of silence before Octavia quickly shifts her expression to a frown and tries to pull the attention away from her confession. “Besides, you're a shit planner. You know you need more than a gun to survive out here.”

Clarke looks at her, mouth open to protest and choosing to ignore her last comment because _they don't owe her anything_. However, Octavia has already grabbed a ration out of one of the bags and is holding it out to her.

“Eat this,” Octavia orders, probably knowing full well that Clarke hasn’t eaten in almost an entire day.

Clarke hesitates, wanting to argue her point but also wanting to respect the other girl’s views. Clarke eventually takes the food without another word, choosing to breach the topic at a later date. Once she pulls at the string keeping the ration contained, Octavia turns and starts walking back the way she first came.

“I’m gonna find some firewood so we can cook this rabbit before dark.” Octavia calls over her shoulder with a dry glance.

“Don’t want anyone else finding you out here, right?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is greatly appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> If you spot any mistakes, please let me know!


End file.
